ARCHIE SHEPP – Three For A Quarter One For A Dime (LP-1969)

Label: Impulse! – AS-9162

Format: Vinyl, LP, Album, Stereo / Country: US / Released: 1969

Style: Free Jazz, Free Improvisation

Recorded at the Both/And Club in San Francisco on February 19th, 1966.

Issued in a gatefold sleeve

Design [Cover] – Byron Goto, Henry Epstein

Engineer – Wally Heider

Liner Notes – Nat Hentoff

Producer – Bob Thiele

A - Three For A Quarter ....................................................... 17:27

B - One For A Dime ............................................................. 15:26

Personnel:

ARCHIE SHEPP – tenor sax and piano

ROSWELL RUDD – trombone

LEWIS WORRELL – bass

DONALD GARRETT – bass

BEAVER HARRIS – drums, percussion

Shepp and his regular quintet of 1966, which also includes trombonist Roswell Rudd, drummer Beaver Harris, and bassists Donald Garrett and Lewis Worrell, really stretch out on this live blowout, there is some solo space for his sidemen, but Shepp dominates the performance, and his emotional style and endurance are in peak form. Intense and rewarding music.

Although “Three for a Quarter One for a Dime” was not released until 1969, it was actually recorded in 1966 at the same show that made up the album “Live in San Francisco”.  Only available in the original vinyl format, the 33 minute piece is divided into 17 ½ minutes on side one, and 15 ½ on side two. “This LP is in  the massive gatefold packaging generously supplied by the Impulse! label is a work of art in itself.

Almost any musical genre seems to enjoy its best years when that style is being invented. The excitement of discovery seems to push a musician’s physical limits beyond their usual capabilities. You can hear this in late 20s jazz and early 40s be-bop, and you can also hear it in the ‘free jazz’ of the 60s. Despite all the attention given to Coltrane and Ornette during this freedom era, quite possibly Archie Shepp, along with Albert Alyer and John Gilmore, were the ones who took the emotional frenzy of this music to its highest level, and “Three for a Quarter” provides an excellent example of Shepp doing just that.

This album opens with Shepp and tromobonist Roswell Rudd leap-frogging an odd melody that’s part bop, part circus music and completely ‘out to lunch’, there is no doubt that we are in for a wild ride. As the band digs in, Rudd and Shepp do some quick exchanges before Rudd backs off and gives Shepp the floor. Archie responds with one of the most intense sax solos you will ever hear anywhere, no shrieks or screams, just an endless assault of notes played with a very gnarly expressive guttural sound. Towards the end of side one, Rudd re-enters and the two soloists raise a wonderful chaos that sounds much bigger than just two. On side two, Rudd takes a solo ride while Shepp backs him on the piano before picking up his horn for one more double solo to close things out. Throughout the precedings, Beaver Harris keeps up a steady roar on the trap set while the two bassists rumble around in the background, although not always particularly distinctively.

Archie Shepp is a restless spirit who has played many styles of music in his career, “Three for a Quarter One for a Dime” is an excellent example of how much furious energy he brought to the ‘new thing’ of the sixties before he moved on to other things.

If you find it, buy this album!

STEVE LACY / ROSWELL RUDD / KENT CARTER / BEAVER HARRIS – Trickles (LP-1976)

Label: Black Saint – BSR 0008

Format: Vinyl, LP, Album / Country: US / Released: 1976

Style: Free Jazz, Free Improvisation

Recorded on March 11 and 14, 1976 at Generation Sound Studios, New York City.

Engineer – Tony May

Painting [Cover Paintings] – Kenneth Noland

Photography By – Nina Melis

Producer – Giocomo Pelliciotti

Steve Lacy / soprano saxophone, composed

Roswell Rudd / trombone, chimes on B2

Kent Carter / bass

Beaver Harris / drums, percussion

... ''For me it was a chance to explore some great music, specifically that of Thelonious Monk. Steve was further down the road, having already released recordings of Monk's music. He even played in Monk's band. So the shared passion for this music became a special focus for us. There was not a week that went by that we didn't rehearse. Steve and I would play regardless of whether bass or drums would show up. This devotion, happening as it did in our early 20s, was to become a fulcrum into the future for us, a permanent musical, even emotional, bond.

The joy of the sound that we got stemming from Monk's high musical intelligence was enough for me. However Steve's vision included more; for him it was also about realizing the commercial potential of this sound. Thankfully there was an entrepreneurial side to him that would serve him abundantly in the years ahead - and many other performers, myself included, would also benefit from this. But here in NYC in the early '60s, that commercial breakthrough never quite happened. For instance, when Steve found a flea-ridden, dark basement beneath Harut's Restaurant in the West Village, I went home, got my hammer, nails and saw. We cleaned up the space and built a platform out of scrap lumber to play on. This was where we first played out in 1961. We passed the hat for six months before moving on to better venues. Finally it was our poet friend Paul Haines who recorded us on a borrowed tape machine in a coffee shop that was released on Emanem Records a few years later as School Days, with Henry Grimes (bass) and Denis Charles (drums). This went through several re-releases in different formats and it has become a favorite collector's item. When Steve pulled up stakes and went to Europe in 1963 he hit the ground running and eventually attracted American musicians residing in Europe as well as European musicians who were drawn into the Monk mystique and Steve's passion for the music. From this point on he would develop the shank of a career spanning the next 40 years. In fact, all and more of the opportunities denied to him in NYC in the early '60s, he would realize in Europe and other parts of the planet, including NYC and America. His musical spirit would produce many remarkable solo performances as well as unique ensembles including his wife, violinist/vocalist Irene Aebi. There is a formidable body of original music that came out of all this.

Thus during the years 1964-2004 I followed his career and although we were living and pursuing whatever we could on two different continents, there were occasional opportunities to touch base or do things together here or in Europe. Over there in 1965 he told me “I'm free now. I'm playing free,” and he was now writing and recording his own material for the first time. In 1976 a little known album called Blown Bone was recorded in NYC, featuring all my compositions. And Trickles (Soul Note) featured music by Steve with Beaver Harris (drums) and Kent Carter (bass). This was actually the first time I played Steve's music. It had a similar deliberate quality to it reminiscent of Monk''...

_ ROSWELL RUDD

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AB BAARS TRIO + ROSWELL RUDD – Four - Live at the BIMhuis 1998 (2001)

Label: DATA Records – DATA 012

Format: CD, Album / Country: Netherlands / Released: 2001

Style: Free Jazz, Contemporary Jazz, Free Improvisation

Recorded live at the BIMhuis Amsterdam, June 6, 1998.

Edited by – Dick Lucas and Ab Baars

Design by – Francesca Patella

1   Miff . . . . 5:43

2   Boo And Milly's Marching Band . . . . 5:18

3   Pound's Stolen Mountain . . . . 5:37

4   Truisch . . . . 7:28

5   Song . . . . 8:58

     The Year Was 1503

6   The Hotel

       Drummer . . . . 6:00

7   The Horsehead Fiddler . . . . 5:08

8   Big Eye Louis Nelson . . . . 6:30

9   Bartolomeo Tromboncino . . . . 9:06

double bass – Wilbert De Joode

drums – Martin Van Duynhoven

tenor saxophone, clarinet – Ab Baars

trombone – Roswell Rudd

Of the second generation of musical freedom fighters, Roswell Rudd proved to be one of the most astute at collective ensemble work. That's not surprising given he cut his teeth playing Dixieland and swing. This session led by Ab Baars gives him an opportunity to demonstrate that his ensemble acumen has sharpened with age. The first five numbers here are devoted to Baars' characteristically quirky Dutch compositions -- little march tunes, folk tunes, wry pop tunes, and the like seasoned with a bit of harmonic indeterminacy. These are developed through a careful interplay between the two horn players. Rudd's gruff yet sensitive trombone and Baars' chirping clarinet make for a piquant ensemble. The music, for all its free flow, remains controlled and maybe a bit too cool. The same cannot be said the final half of the program, devoted to Rudd's suite "The Year Was 1503." The suite is a series of feature numbers for each bandmember tied together by Rudd's rambunctious, over-the-top narration, which mixes the sophomoric with the surreal and is quite as characteristic of the trombonist's broad Yankee vaudeville nature -- remember he did time in a Borscht Belt hotel band -- as Baars' tunes are of his Dutch sensibility. The session ends with Rudd's solo turn, where he exercises his own wild, avant Dixie trombone to fine effect.
_ Review by David DUPONT



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NEW YORK ART QUARTET – Old Stuff (Copenhagen, Denmark 1965) - CD-2010

Label: Cuneiform Records – Rune 300
Format: CD, Album; Country: US - Released: 2010
Style: Free Jazz, Free Improvisation
Tracks 1-6:
Recorded at the Montmartre Jazzhus, Copenhagen, Denmark October 14, 1965.
Tracks 7-11:
Recorded at the Concert Hall of the Radio House, Danish Broadcasting Corporation, Copenhagen, Denmark, October 24, 1965. 
Both concerts were live radio broadcasts.
Producer – Børge Roger Henrichsen (tracks: 7 to 11), Pedro Biker (tracks: 1 to 6), Per Møller Hansen (tracks: 7 to 11)

The story behind Old Stuff is that John Tchicai lined up some gigs in his native Copenhagen for the fall of 1965. The regular drummer (was it still Milford Graves?) and whoever the bass player was at the time (Reggie Workman?) could not make the trip, so the quartet was fleshed out with Finn von Eyben coming in on bass and Louis Moholo on drums. Von Eyben sounds fine on the recording and adds his own conceptual influence. However it is Moholo that changes the character of the band in an more dramatic way. He gives the band a totally different rhythmic base. Moholo's time was quite different from Graves: there is in the former a more linear poly-rhythmic thrust to the pulse that propulses the band differently yet still opens it up to an expanded sense of temporal possibilities. It gives Tchicai and Rudd support for more complex yet still free solo statements and they respond beautifully.
And so you get a long set of music drawn from two gigs they played during their stay that fall. The recording quality is excellent, as is the level of the music. It's a major addition to the NY Art Quartet discography and highly recommended!

New York Art Quartet, Copenhagen, October 1965:
Roswell Rudd  – trombone,  Louis Moholo – drums,
Finn von Eyben – bass,   John Tchicai – alto saxophone

New York Art Quartet, MoMA 1965, (Tchicai, Rudd, Workman, Graves)

There ’ s a certain exciting charge to early free (avant, new thing, or whatever you wish to call it) jazz, an electricity in the air from those days before anyone knew exactly what was happening, which, in its weird, wily experimentation, translates particularly well on record. Before the classic fire music blow out could be formalized into a clearly-delineated model, there was a strange melange of flavors: Sun Ra ’ s Saturn-bop, Ayler ’ s formative howls, Dolphy ’ s skewed vision of cool, Ornette Coleman ’ s sublime honking, and a lot of other open minds stretching way out as they saw fit. The free-for-all spirit of the times makes for some interestingly timeless listening, and the broadly-named New York Art Quartet was one group that was there to catch the wave. Although the smallness of their deeply respectable discography, now only four official albums deep (and one of those is a reunion session from the year 2000), severely restricted their legacy, the players who have moved through their ranks - John Tchicai, Roswell Rudd, Milford Graves, Reggie Workman and Don Moore, to name a few - have certainly made their individual marks. Thus, the unit has remained a sort of legendary footnote, an early, all-too-brief meeting of the minds right at the beginning of the revolution.

Old Stuff, recorded in 1965 and only now seeing the light of day, won ’ t change that. Less of an all-star lineup than their self-titled debut on ESP, it ’ s more of a glimpse back than a lost classic. Fans of that seminal slab might be disappointed by the absence of drummer Milford Graves, and I for one can hardly fathom the pressure of filling his shoes. Along with Sunny Murray and Rasheid Ali, Graves was one of the founding fathers of the un-metered, pan- rhythmic school of drumming to which many remain beholden. Hardly the established approach in ’ 65 that it is today, it ’ s difficult to imagine more than a handful then (or now) capable of matching his innovation and effortless mastery. Still, Louis Moholo does a bang- up job holding things down. Less iconoclastic than his predecessor, his playing sways and sashays more than it rips and shreds, but not without some serious force. There ’ s a certain go- for-broke roughness audible here, and it ’ s exciting to hear him drive the rest of the players, egging them on even as he keeps time.

Around him, the horns squall and cry, but all within a clear melodic framework. The vibe is less sheets of sound than "Lonely Woman," and Coleman ’ s mark is clearly felt. The melodies and motives are tossed around like pizza dough between Tchicai and Rudd, the only two constant members of the NYAQ family, and their chemistry is, if not revelatory, certainly wonderfully sloppy and loose. Apparently the session was booked in Copenhagen, despite the unavailability of half of the New Yokers. Thus, in addition to Moholo, bassist Finn on Eyben fills in, and you definitely get the sense that the Rudd and Tchicai are leading, going for it despite or because of the less practiced setting. There is a confidence to their tone which more than compensates for the oft-rambling structures.

Overall, the record runs a little long, clocking in at just over an hour. But isn ’ t that kind of the point? We already have two proper mid-60s albums from the NYAQ, as well as a whole slew of other classic studio sessions from this deepest of musical eras. Old Stuff is for the heads who wore through their copies of Shape Of Jazz To Come and Ascension when they first came out, for the completists who can ’ t let a single take slip by uncatalogued. As expected, NYAQ rips, moans, screams, and most of all breathes. It ’ s beautiful, messy, raw and not a little bit fun. Like a lot of other stuff from this time, it sounds like a wild party, and yet still serious as your life. It sounds free, unfettered, and alive. It sounds great.

_ By Daniel Martin-McCormick



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